


poppies

by WreakingHavok



Series: DreamSMP Canon Studies [6]
Category: DreamSMP
Genre: And then . And then like a lot later, Charlie and Connor were schlatts friends goddamnit listen to me, Funerals, Gen, Philza misses Wilbur cause he killed him. Go cry about it, Post L’manberg explosion, basically me going feral because of famed ao3 author khio, shits connected, slimecicle cinematic universe, so. Does anybody remember the hexxit videos, thats right, yeah - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-14 13:20:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29419293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WreakingHavok/pseuds/WreakingHavok
Summary: Philza has only seen one lifeless body that he cared to grieve, and President Schlatt is not it.Perhaps if someone had come by and shaved off the mutton chops, if they had removed the yellow from his teeth, from his eyes, if they had lightened his hair and shrunk his horns just a shade - Phil may have been struck with a faint sense of deja vu, may have cared slightly more, may have recognized that this man was closer to twenty than he was to thirty.But nobody comes. Phil is left to his own devices, staring down into an open coffin, and he thinks:they are burying the wrong fucking body.~Philza and Charlie, on elegies to a man they did not know.
Relationships: Charlie Dalgleish & ConnorEatsPants, Charlie Dalgleish & Jschlatt, Jschlatt & Phil Watson (Video Blogging RPF), No Romantic Relationship(s), Phil Watson & Wilbur Soot
Series: DreamSMP Canon Studies [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2099253
Comments: 34
Kudos: 147
Collections: MCYT Fic Rec





	poppies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [everythingFangirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/everythingFangirl/gifts), [Khio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Khio/gifts).
  * Inspired by [brother's keeper](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29412711) by [Khio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Khio/pseuds/Khio). 



> TW: death, discussing corpses and like. Shit associated with funerals and death and dying so just. Careful!!! If you think of anything I need to add please tell me :]
> 
> To Eef because . Idk Charlie Slimecicle or something ?
> 
> Also. I fucking stole this entire thing from Khio I am so fucking sorry khio I really am I promise I . I am so sorry

Philza attends President J. Schlatt’s calling hours and doesn’t really know why.

He arrives half an hour before the funeral itself, the designated time Bad had given out on the invitations. No one is around, just a sad array of folding chairs on a rough hewn stone arena, and a coffin with half the lid propped up sitting front and center. 

Phil’s sandals echo on the floor as he walks the empty line to the casket. Schlatt lies inside, eyes closed, face incredibly pale. No one had cleaned him up before this. His nails are caked with dirt. His clothes are wrinkled, his hair a greasy mess - he reeks of rot and alcohol, cheeks hollow, lips cracked and stained with the effects of sucking down nicotine every day for too many years.

He isn’t shocked. He isn’t horrified. Phil’s seen corpses before, in far too many ways. He’s seen them animated, stumbling towards him in the dead of night. He’s seen them still, stiff, looted - he’s seen them bleached to the bone, he’s seen them fresh. He’s even made them, he’ll admit it; he wouldn’t say he’s numb to it all, but the sight below him does nothing except curl his stomach with something like pity - or disgust. 

He has only seen one lifeless body that he cared to grieve, and President Schlatt is not it.

Perhaps if someone had come by and shaved off the mutton chops, if they had removed the yellow from his teeth, from his eyes, if they had lightened his hair and shrunk his horns just a shade - Phil may have been struck with a faint sense of deja vu, may have cared slightly more, may have recognized that this man was closer to twenty than he was to thirty. 

But nobody comes. Phil is left to his own devices, staring down into an open coffin, and he thinks: _they are burying the wrong fucking body._

“Did you know him?” asks BadBoyHalo. Phil is taken by surprise - he hadn’t noticed him approach.

“No,” Phil shrugs, pulling himself up, straightening his robe.

“Shame. I had an awful time trying to write something to say. We think Wilbur knew him,” Bad says, joining Phil in looking down at the corpse. His face pinches together in pity. “But we don’t really know much else about him. He was a very private man.”

“Sorry,” Phil says helplessly. Wilbur had never talked about his friends. Who’s to fucking say what made up Schlatt besides bloody justice and alcohol? 

Bad shifts slightly in the interest of conversation, pointing just above the coffin. Phil follows his gaze. An oil-painted depiction of Schlatt grins down at him, horns backlit with an ironic halo. “Nihachu painted that portrait. It looks nice, doesn’t it? She said it was a generous recreation, but I think it captures his spirit.”

Phil looks down at the body, and back up to the painting, and down to the body again. He doesn’t have an answer.

“You know, I thought more people would come to this,” Bad says, still trying for small talk, bless him, “but I guess they’re waiting for the funeral.”

“I guess,” Phil says. He looks back up to the painting, and thinks: _they saw enough of his corpse while it was still breathing._

“Are you going to stay?”

Phil shakes his head. “I don’t think so. I’ve got to get myself settled, and all.” 

Bad nods. “Of course. Thank you for paying your respects, Phil - I heard you were a kind man, it’s good to know the legends are true.”

Phil smiles at him through a grimace. “You shouldn’t believe all of them.”

Bad smiles back, just as fake, just as old. “Oh, no. I don’t.”

From down the road, Quackity’s yells begin to echo up towards them. His figure can be seen rushing along the path, chattering loudly and wildly to thin air. Behind him, Fundy and Tubbo slowly and steadily approach the funeral site.

Bad sighs. “Well. Here they come.”

Phil primes his wings, bending his knees and tearing his eyes away from the casket. “Good luck, Mr. Halo.”

“You as well,” Bad says sincerely, meeting his gaze. “You’ll need it, here.”

Phil launches into the air, palms scraping against the bloodied hilt of his sword at his belt, and thinks: _you’re a little bit late for that, mate._

~

_(Forever fixed in the past, there exists a world that is hellish, in the way that it is the only kind of world Phil thinks is worth living in._

_Phil is at the point in his life where there is something itching under his skin, something anxious boiling in his very blood. He is at a point where he understands, finally, just why Technoblade begged to leave, and he is at a point where he cannot see the problem with leaving Tommy in Wilbur’s calloused fingertips._

_He leaves home, and finds the perfect world with the perfect rules - meaning that there are none - and doesn’t hesitate to throw himself in headfirst._

_He arrives with nothing, as per usual. There are dangers, many more than usual, but to Phil, it is much more beautiful than a farm and a peacefully-woven landscape; the majesty of its chaos sends the wings on his back soaring like he hasn’t had the space to do in years._

_The only other person in this land is a young, grinning devil who introduces himself simply as John. He’s bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, quite literally, and has a spark in his eyes that is one wrong step away from dangerous._

_He announces that he likes to entertain company, and Phil should join him for dinner sometime. He is limping on his left leg, and he has nothing but a sword. There is a desperation in his easy speech, and if Phil wasn’t so used to Wilbur Soot, he would have never noticed it._

_Since John is clearly shit at survival, Phil shrugs and carries him along, listening amicably to his plans for the future once he gets out of this, quote, “fucking hellhole.” Phil builds bases and farms and collects and explores, wrangling the land under his arm with ease and power. John helps where he can, telling stories while the night howls, and Phil finds he enjoys the kid’s company._

_Phil’s projects are large and dangerous, often leaving the both of them breathless and tired and sometimes half-dead. John’s greatest achievement is spending two days over the furnace until he’s managed to forge a gold ingot into a pin. Phil looks at it briefly and congratulates him, and then doesn’t think about it again until the night John dies._

_It’s a completely normal death, really. He is out late at night, looking up at the stars, and an arrow drives its way between his ribs and directly into his heart. It’s silent. He holds his breath until his heart stops thrashing, like he had been in charge of his downfall the whole time._

_Phil doesn’t know what happened until the next morning, when he finds only the golden pin on the ground next to the blood-soaked arrow._

_He shrugs and melts the pin down to use for something else._

_This world is a one-shot type deal. The kid will wake up somewhere else, confused, but alive, so Phil doesn’t mourn him, just keeps building and conquering until the itch in his wings flies him into the sun again._

_He comes home to one more child than he should have. He leaves home after a week, and this time, he doesn’t make friends._

_Phil utterly and entirely forgets about John and the way his horns curled ever so slightly asymmetrical around his ears. Phil looks at the body of President Schlatt and the crooked keratin framing his face, and there is no one, dead or alive, who will ever connect the two for him.)_

~

Charlie finds the burial site about three days after spawning.

He’s admittedly hopelessly lost, just trying to find his way back to Snowchester after having dinner with Connor in the Greater Territories, when his eye catches on a curiously hollowed-out piece of mountain. 

Picking his way over to it, he finds it to be a small plateau with delicately arranged stonework - a monument to something, maybe, if the faded _in memoriam_ plaque is any indication. The area is all grown over with that red shit no one will give him a straight answer about. Charlie shrugs and starts peeling away the vines from the main pedestal.

Here is something relevant - Charlie has never been to a funeral. 

He’s seen his fair share of death, don’t get him wrong. He’s seen friends turn on each other for the sake of more power. He’s seen meteors travel towards cities like a punishment for their humanity. 

He’s seen gods kill mortals due to their desperate boredom. He’s seen gods die. He’s _been_ a god, and he has been guilty of the first and the cause of the second.

Charlie is no stranger to death and loss, but he has never been to a funeral, and it is this that slams him to his knees in the middle of the crimson plants, when the last leaf falls away and reveals the smiling, painted face of J. Schlatt.

There is no one around for Charlie to talk to, so he thinks, in this order: _it’s not him, no fucking way,_ and _I am kneeling on his tomb._

Nausea rises in his stomach. The crevice in the wall behind the pedestal gapes open and black, and through the sickly sweet aroma of the blood vines he smells what he can remember to be, plain and simple, decay. 

Schlatt was here, in this server. Schlatt died. Schlatt is, supposedly, buried here. 

This is a lot for Charlie to come to terms with. 

“Hey,” calls someone on the path behind him. It’s Connor, Charlie barely recognizes. “I thought you were headed home.” 

“Uh,” Charlie says. 

“Oh,” Connor says. “I see.”

Footsteps make their way over the landscape towards him. Connor stands in his peripheral before long, arms clutched tight across his chest.

“What,” Charlie whispers, “uh, happened?”

“Motherfucker died,” Connor says, blunt as always.

“Sure.” Last Charlie heard, Schlatt had been dead already, burned to a fucking crisp in the middle of a volcano - banished, screaming, hands clawing at his horns like he wanted to tear them off. 

“They told me I just missed him. Spawned on his last breath.” Connor stares at the painting. “That shit doesn’t even look like him, does it?”

Charlie thinks about Connor and Schlatt. He’d known them together, and now here he is, left with two separate people that used to be one.

This Connor looks worse for wear than the old Connor, back before the meteor strike. He doesn’t wear overalls anymore, just grungy sweats and a hoodie pulled over his bangs like a shield. And Schlatt, well - he had been a god, and then he hadn’t been a god, and that is another story that Charlie doesn’t want to recall, right now. 

“I didn’t know he’d been here,” Charlie says. He should get up, but he feels tired, all of a sudden, frozen to the spot with everything. 

“Me neither.” Connor joins him, crumpling crosslegged on the ground. “What a shock, right?”

“Thought he’d died,” Charlie says.

“Well, he fucking did,” Connor says.

“That’s fucked,” Charlie says, and his hands shake where he claws them into his jeans. 

He’s not sure why he’s upset. It’s not like he wanted revenge, not really - he had done far worse, in the end. He’d be a hypocrite to pin the blame on Schlatt after all that happened. 

But on the other end, he doesn’t fucking miss the guy. Schlatt had tried to kill him. Schlatt had hurt him, hurt his friends, changed him in a way he can’t ever get back, now. 

“How?” he asks, wildly racing through every possibility. “Was it Wilbur? The explosion?”

“Nope.” Connor scoffs, pulling his knees to his chest. “He drank himself to death. Died of a heart attack in front of everybody.”

“Heart attack,” Charlie says.

“They just kinda watched him choke,” Connor says.

“He died of a heart attack,” Charlie repeats.

“And it’s kinda fucked, cause he was the Prime-forsaken president of the place, you know?” Connor just keeps talking. Charlie wonders if he’s ever told anyone these thoughts before. “He was the president. And they all hated him so much, they just watched. Just fucking - nobody even -”

“Was he a good leader?” Charlie asks, like Connor has a prayer of answering it well. 

“How should I know?” Connor murmurs. “I haven’t spoken to him in years.”

“Yeah,” Charlie says. “Maybe that’s for the better.”

“There was a funeral. I didn’t go.”

“I thought you said they hated him.”

“They did. They sold his eyes at Target. Pretty sure Quackity tore through his ribcage during the ceremony and ate his heart.”

“Prime,” Charlie says, horror settling into him. “That’s not - I mean, I wouldn’t know - is that proper funeral etiquette?”

“Fucking horror show,” Connor says. It cracks. “I didn’t go,” he says again.

“I’m sure he wouldn’t blame you,” Charlie says, and thinks: _I would._

It’s silent for a little. Charlie has forgotten all about going home, instead feeling like he could sit here until the world caves in on itself like it has so many times before.

Schlatt was his friend, once. Schlatt was his enemy, after that. Which one does he value more? 

Charlie wonders if Schlatt remembered the scars he left on the world - on Charlie. He wonders if any of it mattered, or if he repressed and regressed in a duet with Wilbur Soot and everything before and in-between was left to burn in the crater. 

Charlie sits on the ground and thinks: _I have never once gotten any fucking closure._

Because here is something relevant - Charlie’s never been to a funeral, despite everything he’s lost. 

“That portrait,” Connor croaks, “doesn’t look a damn thing like him.”

“I’m sorry,” Charlie says, and doesn’t know who he’s talking to, really.

~

_(Grizzly hands him the poor flower with shaking, bloody hands._

_“You can think of me,” he says, smiling through the clear tears on his face. The rain pours down onto their roof and Charlie thinks he may hyperventilate with fear._

_The flowers are already wilting, petals missing from the gale. They are bright red, glaring, awful in the hazy moonlight, but Charlie clutches his to his heart like he can shove it behind his ribs and keep it beating there forever._

_“You can hold the poppy and think of me,” Grizzly says; Condi croaks out something desperate and grabs Grizzly to his chest, a crushing hug, like he will never be able to do it again if they let go._

_“You can think of me,” Grizzly jokes with too much realism lodged in his throat, meeting Charlie’s bloodshot eyes, “and I will already be dead!”_

_Much later, Charlie doesn’t cry when he pushes Grizzly into the lava, but he does scream until he chokes and coughs for five minutes on the suffocating ash._

_Charlie has never been to a funeral. This is the closest he gets: he and Condi do not have a body to bury, but together, they throw their poppies into the volcano and listen to the way the world burns.)_

**Author's Note:**

> The videos I reference here are Philza and Schlatt’s Hexxit series as well as Slimecicle’s “Minecraft, but every 5 minutes there’s a natural disaster.” I also allude to Slimecicle’s “The HARDEST Minecraft Difficulty.” Because it fucking slaps. The best piece of cinema I’ve ever seen


End file.
